By Maya joseph

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By Ansley Wiederholt

I thought he was perfect.

And I was the fool, sweet words and even sweeter gestures are all it took for him to completely capture me.

And everyone who admired us together only made me more foolish, I was so deep for him that every word he spoke was divine, and every smile was celestial. I was walking on a flower petal path when we were together, everything so pink and beautiful.

When the toxins first surrounded our air, I never noticed the poison that he poured over me and only blamed myself, and as I did that, the more everything bad in our relationship became my fault.

“I’ll try harder next time, I was wrong for that,” I convinced myself regularly and this seemed to please him, if only it was a little while.

His mood had fluctuated, he was the man I fell in love with to me in the morning but a stranger to me before the sun even set. Despite my efforts to fulfill him, nothing for him was good enough.

The way I cooked, talked, or even walked became a nuisance not even a year into our relationship.

I kept constantly changing myself, ripping myself apart at the seams and rebuilding myself in a way that he would like.

I was only good enough for a short period before I had to take myself apart again, before he did it for me.

I spoke less, acted more conservatively, and became less and less of what I used to be day by day. When asked, what happened to me and why I do the things I do, I could only reply, “Because I love him.”

But the more I said it, the less true it became.

When did the bruises on me become so familiar? The fact that all my friends came to me if they needed me to recommend them a new concealer wasn’t something I was proud of.

I tried to save myself one day, telling my friends that I was hurt and that I couldn’t deal with it anymore. But my complaints were only seen as ‘trivial’ and ‘dramatic’ because he just looked so nice and cute, how could he hurt anyone? “Boys will be boys,” was the only advice I could receive before being laughed at in the face.

It wasn’t until the very end that I realized what was happening to me, I ran down the street from our tiny apartment when he wasn’t there, feeling free despite suffocating as I broke away from the toxic air.